CRMs can be much more than mere data-gathering systems. If used correctly, your CRM can help boost every customer-related metric across your business.
As you know, customer satisfaction is king in the modern market. People today have a broad selection of businesses and services to choose from, and they’ve put increasing demands on companies.
Furthermore, customers can choose to leave a company quickly if its customer service isn’t up to par. In fact, most global consumers agree that customer service is a crucial factor when choosing a brand, and a third of customers chose to abandon businesses due to a lack of personalization.
There’s no doubt that customer service and satisfaction are the primary ingredients in building trust.
These aspects of business influence how people view brands and if they choose to stay with a company. As a result, organizations across all industries see customer satisfaction as a priority.
Luckily, as customer demands increased over time, so did the tools that allow businesses to meet those demands.
This article will tell you about a particular tool that could improve your customer satisfaction that you might not expect – your CRM.
How to Boost Customer Satisfaction Using Your CRM
Although CRMs are often viewed as tools with primarily internal use, they also have plenty of potentials when it comes to boosting customer experience.
It’s true that the main purpose of your CRM is to track and gather data. And that data is crucial for sales and, by extension, profits.
However, it can also help your business improve customer satisfaction to a considerable degree.
How?
1. Create Personalised Communications
Your CRM can help you keep in touch with customers and maintain constant communication with them. What’s more, the way you communicate with clients can be highly personalized.
With a good CRM, you won’t be limited to sending generic follow-ups or promotional emails. Instead, you’ll be able to create custom messages with subject lines that directly speak to your customers. Your CRM will supply all the crucial information to make this possible.
The personalization that your CRM enables isn’t surface-level either. The software can track important activities and events, keeping you up to date on the client’s purchases, conversations, and even upcoming birthdays.
This data will keep your communication fresh and tailored to individual customers.
What’s more, Automation Agency can make it easier for you to send out customized messages. Our Automation Heroes can build email templates in line with your style and branding to help you send out your personalized emails quickly and easily.
2. Ensure Faster Response Times
Response time can play a critical role in certain aspects of customer management, especially conversions.
Truth is, people aren’t used to waiting for a business to respond. Oftentimes, this means that the fastest responder will get the sale.
That conclusion is backed by some insightful data.
First, almost a third of customers expect to receive a response within an hour, with over 10% expecting that response time to be as short as 15 minutes. Those expectations also lead to staggering differences in conversions.
Businesses that take less than six hours to respond can boost their conversion rates up to 40%, while those with a response time shorter than one hour can get nearly 50% more sales.
The issue is that manual responses might not be fast enough to accommodate customer expectations. Luckily, your CRM offers an ideal solution.
Through a combination of CRM, AI, and automation, your system can respond nearly instantly. Faster response times will allow you to maintain excellent communication with your customers, improving customer satisfaction, your marketing campaigns, and, of course, conversions and sales.
3. Track Customer Needs for Better Problem-Solving
Ideally, every customer service should keep customer needs in mind when solving potential issues with your products. And your CRM can help you in that regard, and to a large extent.
Among the data that lets you know about what your customer needs, customer feedback is particularly insightful.
People often leave more-or-less extensive feedback on the products and services they use and will contact businesses directly with that intent. However, these useful pieces of information can get lost among your operational systems and documents. Besides, even if you gather all the feedback in one place, analyzing it is a challenge of its own.
But with the right CRM, tracking customer needs through feedback and other sources can become a breeze.
Once your CRM gathers the relevant data, you can leverage it to provide specific solutions for any problems that might pop up.
And suppose you decide to perform regular surveys and take on the customer feedback aspect from a proactive point. In that case, the amount of information you’ll end up with will ensure your customer service is at the highest level possible.
It should go without saying that quick and effective problem-solving that takes customer needs into account will dramatically increase customer satisfaction.
4. Keep Customer Information Safe and Secure in a Central Location
Data gathering has recently become a loaded term. Security issues and an increase in cyberattacks have made customers wary of sharing their personal info, even if it’s for the betterment of the service provided.
When you implement a quality CRM solution, you can rely on it to keep sensitive information safe. It’s because many modern CRMs have extensive security options and feature additional integrations to stave off potential attacks. These features will give you and your customers much-needed peace of mind.
Besides protecting customer data, your CRM offers another advantage: it gathers all that critical info in a single place.
Having your customer’s contacts, social media, purchases, service, and other information in one location makes the data accessible to every member of your team when needed. And when your staff has immediate access to the relevant information, they can react more quickly and accurately.
The combination of data security and instant accessibility will undoubtedly contribute to customer experience, boosting trust in your organization.
5. Omni and Cross-Channel Connectivity
Customer management would be much simpler if all the engagement and communication would go on through a single channel. However, that’s not really the case in the modern market.
People have different preferences when it comes to reaching out to brands. They might opt for social media, email, chat, or even the old-fashioned but reliable phone calls.
To make matters more complicated, your customers will expect you to respond just as swiftly regardless of their channel of choice.
So, your customer service has the responsibility of being available for feedback, questions, or requests. To that end, it’s best to maintain a presence across various channels.
However, having omnichannel communication options comes with additional issues. One of which is that your customers won’t view their interactions as limited to a single channel. Instead, they’ll expect that the data they share gets across every channel.
In other words, when a customer contacts your service through chat, they won’t want to repeat the information they gave via chat on a follow-up phone call.
While making your communication function seamlessly across channels might sound overwhelming, your CRM can make that connectivity effortless. Since complete user data is compiled on one system, your team will have no issues tracking the needs and requirements of individual customers through different channels.
6. Use the CRM as a Learning Tool for Sales Staff
Customer support isn’t the only aspect of your business that CRM can improve. Your sales and marketing departments can also utilize the information to become more efficient.
The data gathered in your CRM can be extensive, to say the least. It can contain age, gender, and contact information, as well as info about your customer’s interests, spending habits, professions, habits, and locations.
All that information can be invaluable in marketing campaigns and sales conversations. Your representatives can understand which products or services are the most relevant to your customers and offer them to the appropriate groups.
Of course, this approach will prove extremely effective when it comes to promotions.
Your sales staff can target specific subsections of your customer base with offers that seem tailored to their specific needs. In that case, the benefits will go beyond an increase in conversion and sales rates.
When your sales team understands your customers, they can build a stronger relationship between the prospects and your brand. This level of customer experience is far superior to what happens when a business puts out only generic offers.
7. Maintaining Consistency in the Customer Experience
The customer experience you can provide by utilizing your CRM to its full extent can be specific, personalized, and, most importantly, consistent.
CRM can keep your communication highly proactive while maintaining contact with customers at regular intervals. Integrating this tool into your operations will make a great experience more than a one-time deal. Instead, your customers will be certain that they’ll receive a quality service whenever they interact with your brand.
Naturally, customer experiences that are constantly positive will lead to immense customer satisfaction. By using a CRM, your business will be able to keep your clients in the loop about the latest news, share useful information, resolve customer issues, and make your offers readily available.
All this will create a loyal, satisfied customer base.
When people feel their needs and time are valued, they’ll be happy to stay with your brand and less likely to turn to the competition. In the long run, the reputation of your business will keep growing, attracting new prospects.
Your CRM Is the Key to Customer Management
The vast amount of data stored in your CRM can be used to your advantage in every crucial aspect of your business.
By maximizing your CRM, your organization can improve customer service, boost sales, and create tailored marketing strategies that never miss their mark. Unsurprisingly, all this will produce the highest level of customer experience, strengthening your position in the market.
Of course, if you want to leverage your CRM to reap these benefits, you’ll need to ensure the system’s set up correctly. And Automation Agency can help you in that regard.
Contact our Concierge Service and see how our experienced team can integrate a dependable CRM into your marketing, sales, and customer service operations.
